What's it all about, Alfie?

Today the guys at Flying Meat released Acorn 1.0.2 - there are a mostly bug fixes but there are a few new features too. Nothing that's super exciting right now, but it's nice to see the changes and even the little additions. I'm looking forward to 1.1 where Gus says there will be more significant additions like a 'Save for Web' where it'll try to figure a good way to save the image in a small size without compromising image quality.

And while we're on the subject of image editors, Photoshop Elements 6.0 is due out in 2008 for the Mac. They haven't really listed the features it'll have, but if it looks like PSE 6.0 for Windows it's going to be very different from what is PSE 4.0. It's been said that it looks like Lightroom, but having not seen that app, I can only say that the features look decent but the UI is very "enclosed" - not at all Mac-like. Very much like you'd run this app to the exclusion of other apps - no toolbars - one giant window. Very different. Not sure I like the change.

This morning Pixelmator was released as 1.0 and I had to check it out. Certainly, it looks more like Photoshop, but with a decidedly Mac-like twist - very nice. There are a lot of things to like about Pixelmator - the number of file formats is impressive - able to read/write Photoshop files is a big plus. Also, the toolbar is a lot more familiar, not necessarily better - just more familiar. There are little things like the color changing, the brushes, etc. They aren't in Acorn - yet.

And there's the problem, for me.

Do I stick with Acorn or go to Pixelmator. Both are "1.0" products, but there's no need to get both, one should do what I need an image editor to do, it's just a question of which one has the same end game that I want. Since they are both young, and both small groups, it's not clear that there's a definitive answer to that question for either application.

I want to like Acorn due to VoodooPad, but the professional look of Pixelmator makes it so darn compelling. It's certainly going to be an interesting year to see which one gets the larger audience, and which one goes for the larger toolset even at the risk of a little complexity. I'm willing to have a little complexity for tools that I would use, it's the other stuff that I'd never use that is really unnecessary for me.

Well... it'll be interesting to watch these products develop.

OK, once again I am amazed by the quality of the software from the top-tier developers in the Mac Community. This morning it's the announcement of Acorn from Flying Meat. Incredible. I use Photoshop Elements for most all of my graphical work. It's nice and powerful and it does everything I need it to do - at a fraction of the cost of Photoshop. Nothing wrong with Photoshop, and if it were cheaper and lighter weight, I'd be a user. But it's neither. It's a very large app - both in cost and in machine footprint. So I was very interested in seeing what Acorn had to offer.

I use VoodooPad and FlySketch, so I wanted to like Acorn for that point of view, but I knew that I had real needs for a bit-mapped image editor that several lesser apps just didn't cut it for me. For instance, Inkscape is a nice idea, and it's free, but it's more cumbersome than I'd like. Also, the GiMP is nice, and I've used it for a very very long time on a lot of different platforms, but I've had to get a book on it to make sure I knew how to do the things I needed to do in it.

Photoshop Elements was as close to perfection as I have come, but I hated the redesign of the tool options panel and the constant menu bar under the menu bar. Not to mention that it's still a PowerPC app and is not as fast as it could be because of that. It works, and I was living with the issues, but I was a little miffed that I haven't seen an update in all these months that Photoshop CS3 has been out. I'd even considered dropping down my own money for Photoshop CS3.

But I was saved by Acorn.

As I said, I was a little worried that Acorn was going to fall short of what I needed so I downloaded it and took it for a trial spin. I was very impressed to see that it had the layers capabilities... I use that from time to time. And I played with it a bit to see how it felt to make selections, zoom in, use the tools. It all felt very natural - much more so than Photoshop Elements. When I checked the memory footprint it was 30MB as opposed to Photoshop Elements' 150+MB. Again, light on it's toes in terms of machine footprint. Nice.

So I decided to take it for a real spin and have it do the most difficult thing I've done in Photoshop Elements recently - the soft-focus/fade of an image for the weblog. It's nothing really earth-shaking, but it's the most advanced thing I've done in Photoshop, and it took a Googling to figure out how to do it in Photoshop Elements. In Acorn it was obvious. Amazing. Once I played with a few things and got a feel for where things are, I was able to knock it out in no time. Amazing. Acorn even has the most common file types I use for my work. Again, nothing earth-shaking, but just simple, clean, natural, and easy.

If you have a need for Photoshop and can't justify the cost, give Acorn a try. I was amazed.

This morning I was spending a little time trying to get a few more images uploaded to my WordPress weblog - one for Coding and another for Cube Life. I had picked out some nice images from Xcode and the web, and the Xcode one uploaded as nice as can be. But then the trouble started.

Try as I might, I could not get this one image uploaded. It was about a 50kb JPEG image and I tried it several times. No good. So I tried a little more compression to bring it down to about 25kb, and still no good. So I tried PNG - both 50kb in size and 25kb in size. No good. So I decided to look at the XML-RPC logs of MarsEdit. No help there.

Finally, I logged onto HostMonster and saw that the smaller PNG image actually got uploaded and the thumbnail image was created. Hmmm... I know that the images are also stored in a plist for MarsEdit and an image directory, but when I went to add it manually, it looked a lot more complex than a simple edit session, and I was afraid of messing things up. So I tried a few more things, and then finally emailed everything to Daniel at Red Sweater Software.

I wanted to send him the image and the RPC log from MarsEdit so that he could see what was happening. Maybe there's something happening that I didn't see, or something in the way the file is being encoded. Don't know. Interestingly, on the test case, the image made it up to WordPress, so I think I'm going to try and edit the plist to see if I can force it into the system.

UPDATE: this was an interesting puzzle to crack, and in the end I don't know that I've cracked it as much as I know what works and what doesn't. So, here's what I found out:

• Use Photoshop's Save to Web for maximum compression - this may be extremely obvious, but I tried using GraphicConverter and it wasn't a lot of help, and I tried saving it to different formats, but in the end, it was Photoshop that told me what I needed to be saving it as, and it showed me side-by-side images to allow me to choose what to do. That's the important first step: get the image size down to as small as possible.
• Somehow, get the Image to WordPress - this was interesting because in some cases, the failed upload from MarsEdit did actually get the image up to WordPress. Sometimes it didn't. I had greater success with smaller GIF files than PNG or JPEG files that were a little bigger. I'm guessing you can upload images from the WordPress Dashboard, but I haven't figured that out, and MarsEdit was good enough.
• If you have to replace an image - delete and then add - this is most easily done by deleting the images in the MarsEdit directory, and removing the entry in the plist, and then going to WordPress' Dashboard and deleting the image there. Then add it back in. This way, you get the thumbnails made by both programs.
• When adding an image to MarsEdit omit the thumbnail - MarsEdit will create the thumbnail if you just place the image in the MarsEdit directory, create a new plist entry with the right values and omit the thumbnail image and plist entry.

With these tips, I was able to remove images from both locations, replace images, and in general, get around these uploading problems that I've been having. When I was exchanging emails with Daniel on this issue he was surprised about this behavior and wanted me to send him more files that I run across that have this same problem.

This morning I wanted to get a few things done with regards to MarsEdit, and my journal (weblog). The first was an issue I'd been having with MarsEdit and importing/including images. When I first captured the Apple logo for decorating Apple-related posts, I got it at a size that was smaller than I wanted. But it was in the beginning and I didn't really know it was a bad size until I used it a bit and created a few more. Then I made another and imported it on top of the original. This sent the image to WordPress and all appeared OK, but it wasn't. Not really.

When I went to add in yesterday's entry about the new iPods, I realized that the size tag in the inclusion was wrong. I had to hand-edit it. Same with the others in WordPress. So then I started playing with it. Turns out, it was inserting the old size with the new image. So I had a bit of a problem. I posted a message to the MarsEdit support forum and didn't directly get my answer, but got close enough.

It turns out that the image is saved into $(HOME)/Library/Application Support/MarsEdit/UpdloadedFiles/ and it's dimensions are also stored in the UploadedFiles.plist in the MarsEdit support directory. So, by placing the correct file from WordPress' uploads directory into the correct place in the /UploadedFiles/ directory, editing the plist, and restarting MarsEdit, I got it working.

Daniel (of MarsEdit) says that he's working on the library functions of MarsEdit to make this more foolproof. Now that I know what I know, I can deal with this, and I'll be much more careful about making icons in the first place, but it's nice that it's all there to be hacked upon.

The second thing I wanted to do was to see about updating WordPress on HostMonster, my hosting provider. Turns out, I was running 2.1.3, and 2.2.2 had some security fixes that it's always good to stay up on. I was very happy to see that when I went into Fantastico on HostMonster, it even pointed out that I had an older version of WordPress, and that I should update it. The update went very smoothly and in a few minutes I was running 2.2.2 and everything was fine. Excellent support from the HostMonster, and WordPress is an excellent tool.

I like to keep up to date on the software that I use on a daily basis, and with my move to HostMonster for hosting and WordPress for my journal (blog), I have been using MarsEdit a lot lately. So I was very interested in the word I'd been hearing about version 2.0. A completely redesigned interface, new features, more media choices... all made it sound like a must have update. So when I found that it was out yesterday, I had to check it out and upgrade.

What I found almost made me laugh. I had originally written my journal on static HTML pages. Then I moved to a PostgreSQL-driven database journal on my Sun box with a web-based PHP front-end. When I got my first iBook I took the time to make an XML-RPC driven interface to the Journal on the Solaris back-end and a Mac OS X client on the front-end. It allowed me to do a lot of the things that MarsEdit can now do, but it was a lot more unrefined and lacked all the polish that MarsEdit has. What was funny was that with the move to MarsEdit 2.0, the main window looks exactly like my iJournal app. I had to giggle. I may have been onto something after all.

I'm glad to have moved to WordPress, HostMonster, and MarsEdit, but it's funny to see that I wasn't all that far off on what made a good journaling (blogging) application, after all.

Yesterday Apple updated iWork '08 and with the addition of Numbers to iWork, it was something I really had to try. I've been putting off getting MS Office for a long time. I just didn't like the idea of spending money on another Microsoft product, and TextEdit and Mesa did almost all the tasks I needed. But they weren't 100%, and in the end, I still had to do a lot of fiddling with Word, Excel, etc. So I was happy to see that iWork added a spreadsheet.

I got the trial and tried to open up some of the critical Excel and Word docs that I needed to have. For the most part, I need to be able to read and write these formats, so it was very nice that right there on the web sites, it says Pages and Numbers can read and write Office formatted files. Combine that with the fact that the style of these apps is incredible, and you have a really compelling argument.

Then again, it's $79.

Sold.

I will use the trial until I get the serial number in the email, or get the package from Apple in a few days. It's nice to be able to support the Good Guys and at the same time fit in with the rest of the business world on the file formats. Yup... I'm a big Apple fan.

I've been working on this far more than I intended, but I'm trying to find a way to make it work for me while at work. The problem is that the one factor that is key to this problem is the configuration of the HostMonster server - and I have no control over that at all. I have a few more details, but they aren't surprising: if I set:

    Compression no

in my ~/.ssh/config file, then I don't get any bytes transferred, but if I set:

    Compression yes

then I get at least some data transferred. This makes some sense - if I'm sending it in batches, I send the first batch and unpack it, and then I wait for some handshaking. I'm not getting that handshaking. If I don't compress it, then I'm trying to send the first byte and that's getting there, but with no handshake, it's probably not enough for the OS to write out to the filesystem.

There's nothing specific about this from my Googling, but I have a feeling that it's one of two things:

• some path from Ameritech to HostMonster is different and messing things up by bad transfers, or something like that
• an update the HostMonster staff did to OpenSSH

My reasoning for the first is that the path from Comcast to HostMonster does not have to be the same as the path from Ameritech to HostMonster. At some point, one of the pipes could have changed, been reconfigured, etc. and this would be the source of the problem. My reasoning for the second is that the HostMonster box has to be in the mix for a failure, and the box has been rebooted recently so it's not a stalled process, etc.

It's possible that there's something with the routing in the building, but then I'd have problems no matter where I went, so I don't think it's that. Also I know they'd have to go through a lot of paperwork to get any changes approved/done. So it's unlikely that someone 'forgot' about it.

I still haven't heard from the HostMonster technical support guys, and they said 24 hours, but I'm guessing that they are a little behind schedule on this - or are trying to track it down. In either case, I'm really at their mercy on this one.

I'm running a few traceroutes from work and home and I'll compare them to see where the paths converge, as they have to as they both eventually get to the same box. We'll see what happens.

UPDATE: I did this traceroute from work to the HostMonster machine (deleting the times and removing any repeated lines with no information):

     1  192.168.100.1 (192.168.100.1)
     2  192.168.1.1 (192.168.1.1)
     3  adsl-68-22-220-1.dsl.chcgil.ameritech.net (68.22.220.1)
     4  dist2-vlan60.chcgil.ameritech.net (67.38.101.35)
     5  bb2-g7-0.chcgil.ameritech.net (151.164.242.210)
     6  151.164.93.49 (151.164.93.49)
     7  asn2828-xo.eqchil.sbcglobal.net (151.164.249.98)
     8  p5-0-0.rar1.chicago-il.us.xo.net (65.106.6.133)
     9  p6-0-0.rar2.denver-co.us.xo.net (65.106.0.25)
    10  p0-0-0d0.rar1.denver-co.us.xo.net (65.106.1.73)
    11  65.106.6.82.ptr.us.xo.net (65.106.6.82)
    12  207.88.83.102.ptr.us.xo.net (207.88.83.102)
    13  ip65-46-48-66.z48-46-65.customer.algx.net (65.46.48.66)
    14  * * *
     ...
    64  * * *

and I did this one from home to the HostMonster machine (again, deleting the times and removing the repeated lines at the end):

     1  www.routerlogin.com (192.168.1.1)
     2  10.1.1.1 (10.1.1.1)
     3  * * *
     4  ge-1-37-ur01.romeoville.il.chicago.comcast.net (68.86.118.213)
     5  te-3-1-ur02.wchicago.il.chicago.comcast.net (68.87.230.113)
     6  te-8-4-ur01.wchicago.il.chicago.comcast.net (68.87.231.213)
     7  * te-2-1-ar01.elmhurst.il.chicago.comcast.net (68.87.230.105)
     8  68.87.230.254 (68.87.230.254)
     9  68.86.90.178 (68.86.90.178)
    10  68.86.90.181 (68.86.90.181)
    11  te-4-2.car2.chicago1.level3.net (4.71.182.33)
    12  ae-14-55.car4.chicago1.level3.net (4.68.101.136) \
        ae-24-56.car4.chicago1.level3.net (4.68.101.168) \
        ae-14-51.car4.chicago1.level3.net (4.68.101.8)
    13  wbs-connect.car4.chicago1.level3.net (4.71.102.26)
    14  tg9-2.cr01.chcgildt.integra.net (209.63.114.37)
    15  * * *
    16  tg13-4.cr01.sttlwatw.integra.net (209.63.114.69)
    17  tg13-1.cr01.ptleorte.integra.net (209.63.114.98)
    18  tg13-4.cr02.ptleorte.integra.net (209.63.114.142)
    19  tg13-1.cr02.boisidpz.integra.net (209.63.114.18)
    20  tg13-4.cr01.boisidpz.integra.net (209.63.114.13)
    21  tg13-1.cr01.slkcutxd.integra.net (209.63.114.30)
    22  tg9-1.ar10.slkcutxd.integra.net (209.63.114.254)ms
    23  gw0-cust-bluehost-com.slkc.eli.net (70.97.59.22)
    24  * * *
     ...
    64  * * *

So I look at this and don't see them meet up anywhere, so this isn't going to help me in seeing where the paths diverge. I also looked at the details of the ping packets from the two locations to HostMonster - one is 46 hops, the other is 49, both are in the sub-80 msec range. No help there.

I can't look at the reverse paths because they are behind routers - Oh, I could look at the HostMonster to local pops, but when I try that I get Operation not permitted - no doubt for security reasons.

I've tried copying the file from HostMonster to my machine at work and that works great! Once again, it gets more confusing. I can copy from there, but I can't copy to there. Also, I looked and they don't support WebDAV or WebDAV HTTPS - which are both supported by Transmit/Coda.

I've tried running:

    scp -l 10 file dest:

which is meant to limit the bandwidth used to 10kbps, and that sent the first packet and then stalled out. Same behavior as always.

As a final test, I tried using the FTP Manager on the ControlPanel for the HostMonster domain, and even that doesn't allow me to upload the file. There's something very wrong going on. And depending on the data you look at, it appears as though every component is working. But clearly, I'm not looking at the tests correctly.

Well... it had to happen, but I have to say that I'm more than a little surprised at the problem. This morning I had my first HostMonster problem - I could not upload an 81kb JPG image. It was a simple Google Maps image of the house, and I was just updating the web site with a more recent satellite picture of the place, when this hit. The changed HTML file uploaded just fine... there was plenty of disk space... the scp command appeared to work, but just never returned control to the shell. I was able to transfer the same file to my iMac G5 at home, so it's not the networks here, or the box. So it's got to be something with HostMonster.

I sent in a trouble tick to them and we'll see how quickly they get around to answering my ticket email. I'm hoping it's nothing serious. I know the SSH is working because I can get an ssh shell on the box, so that's not it. And part of the file transfers fine. But just not all of it.

I hope they figure out the issue soon.

UPDATE [10:00am]: I don't know if this matters, but I put in a ticket with HostMonster under my email address, but I think I needed to make an email/support account with them. So I did that, added in the ticket again, and now it shows up as a valid, open, ticket with them. I would have sworn that I'd have done this already for getting the SSH access, but maybe not. Anyway, it's set up now and the ticket should not have any reason not to be processed now.

UPDATE [12:30pm]: I have tried using straight ftp, CyberDuck(sftp), straight scp, and scp from within Coda, which is basically Transmit. They all do the exact same thing - the transfer appears to work because the sending client says it's done, but then it hangs there and the connection times out. There's been no action on the ticket yet, so I'm going to give them a little more time and then I'm going to call and ask that they look into it.

UPDATE [3:15pm]: I have tried different combinations and settings based on the Googling I did with this problem. I can send it with scp from my iMac G5 at home, and that's what I did in a pinch to get the file up to the site. However, sending it home to send it up to HostMonster is not the real solution. I have asked about the port filtering here at work, and there is none, so that's not an issue. I've tried the WiFi versus wired ethernet and that didn't make a difference. I've tried large text files versus smaller JPG files, and that doesn't matter - nor does the size. It's as if most of the file gets transferred, but the last chunk of it doesn't because of what seems to be a failing handshake at the end of the transfer. So I can transfer 80kb - as long as it's a 180kb text file, but a 30kb image will not get sent completely because of the failing handshake. Very odd. Still no word from HostMonster on the ticket. I'm going to call them.

UPDATE [4:00pm]: I called HostMonster and talked to a Tech Support guy there. He tried using FileZilla to upload a file and it worked just fine. Not surprising. I got FileZilla for Mac OS X, tried it and found that it accurately reported the transferred byte count, but it timed out at 12288 bytes of a 71kb file. Then it tried again, timed out again, and repeated. I cancelled it after three tries. I added this to the ticket at HostMonster, so they'd know what I tried, and that not all the data was getting up there in this particular instance. The Tech Support guy said that they try to get to all tickets within 24 hrs., so I'll give them a day. Who knows, I'm guessing it's going to work from home, and it may work from here tomorrow. I'll have to check.

UPDATE [7:00pm]: I checked when I got home to see if I could scp the file from home on my laptop. I know it worked for my iMac G5, but I wanted to make sure it was going to work for my MacBook Pro. It did. There's got to be something about the link at work and HostMonster. Very very odd that this is the problem, but I can send from home to HostMonster, I can send from work to home, but I can't send from work to HostMonster. Very odd.